Quote

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.

James G. Frazer

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James G. Frazer
Age: 87 †
Born: 1854
Born: January 1
Died: 1941
Died: May 7
Anthropologist
Classical Scholar
Ethnographer
Ethnologist
Folklorist
Historian
Mythographer
Scientist
Theologian
Writer
Glasgow
Scotland
Sir James George Frazer
J. G. Frazer
James Frazer
Steps
Master
Haunt
Dead
Slave
Forefathers
Death
Indeed
Savage
Spirit
Notion
Savages
Past
Rule
Spirits
Truth
Masters
Reverse
Birth
Iron
Mankind
Visible
Freest

More quotes by James G. Frazer

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Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.
James G. Frazer
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The world cannot live at the level of its great men.
James G. Frazer
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For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.
James G. Frazer
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In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.
James G. Frazer
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Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.
James G. Frazer
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It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.
James G. Frazer
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The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
James G. Frazer
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The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.
James G. Frazer
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In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.
James G. Frazer
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If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.
James G. Frazer
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The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.
James G. Frazer
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By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.
James G. Frazer
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The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.
James G. Frazer
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Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.
James G. Frazer
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The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.
James G. Frazer
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This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages
James G. Frazer
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Small minds cannot grasp great ideas to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.
James G. Frazer
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The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.
James G. Frazer
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The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.
James G. Frazer
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Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.
James G. Frazer